An electronic book (e-book) is a book-length publication in digital form, comprising text, images, or both. An e-book may be produced on, published through, and readable on computers and other electronic devices. For example, e-books may be read on dedicated hardware devices known as e-readers or e-book devices, on personal computers, tablet computers and mobile phones. E-books can originate in digital form, i.e., have their initial incarnations in electronic form. In such cases, e-books may exist without any printed equivalent.
People who are accustomed to using traditional books often find and remember content in documents in an intuitive manner, for example, by recalling various visual aspects of a page, even including the degree of page use by dirt on a page, or by flipping through books and finding content. The speed of manual flipping of pages in an actual book can depend on certain factors, for example, use of the book, and the condition of pages and book spines. Delays in page flipping caused by one or more of these factors can help a user find content. Presently, no known methods exist to help individuals perform equivalent actions in e-books, whether the content resides on dedicated readers, smart phones, tablets, or other such devices.
Current technology allows users of e-book readers or other devices on which e-books can be read, to manually create simple bookmarks, which allow users to “jump” to sections of e-books. Additional known methods permit manually highlighting lines of text and annotating e-books, for example, by using a stylus.